Spirit animals had a moment. Consider Eeyore as 2023’s symbolic mascot: in Milne’s classic, the dolorous stuffed donkey loses his tail, and Pooh discovers Owl using it as a bell-pull — the thing that moves the hammer inside a bell. Forgive me, it was published in 1926, so context may be required. Outside Poohville, that translates as having your proverbial ass handed to you: Q2 job loss, adult diaper duty with my 93 year old mother whose bowels fire off without warning, the sale of a Porsche Boxster just after buying a Porsche Boxster, spending too much on healthcare and dental procedures, burning my eyebrows off lighting a fire with too much accelerant, tearing the meniscus in my right knee having sex and getting bilked on payment for filming a ten day charity bike ride from Niagara Falls to Key West by a producer who decamped to Haiti. So sayonara, arrivederci, au revoir, auf wiedersehen and good riddance, 2023.
After the Superbowl, it’s tax season. The Wall Street Journal recommends selling appreciated stocks in a year when one’s AGI (adjusted gross income) is in a flat spin owing to an unexpected layoff. Capital gains could have little to no tax liability. Having done that six months ago, taxes are only part of the worry: avoiding the Charybdis of the dispossession cycle looms. In economic free fall, one liquidates assets, monitors the savings burn rate, unsubscribes from streaming services and becomes that guy in theDirectTV spot who gets angry waiting on hold with the cable company, blows off steam playing racquetball, gets hit in the eye and has to wear an eyepatch. On the bus ride home from the court, street hoods make him for a tough guy because he’s wearing an eye patch. They want to find out just how tough, so they give chase down the street looking the beat the snot out of him. Our hero wakes up in a roadside ditch. “Don’t wake up in a roadside ditch. Get DirectTV.” This ad makes me forget I’ll have to put the house up for sale in July. Well done, DirectTV, well done.
Birthdays are coming up that I’d like to skip over like parking lot speed bumps — my wife’s in late January and mine on the 1st day of spring. The vernal equinox; an awakening — crocuses, lilies and tulips sprouting from the wet, dirty ground; Easter, just around the corner. For those who still dally in Paganism, spring signals Persephone’s return from her winter tour as Hades’ concubine. Demeter, Persephone’s mother, stops pining about the kidnapping and returns to her day job as the Goddess of the Harvest to get buds budding and shoots shooting. Since 2000, March 20th has coincided with bad weather, the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom (smart bombs on TV) and the global lock down due to the covid epidemic. It’s more of a revelation than an awakening. Nothing that bad (world-historically speaking) has happened on my wife’s birthday, but I haven’t scrubbed the date that hard. Her special day falls so soon after the wallet gut of Christmas that I’d rather get mugged than buy another gift. Disagreements over money are one of the leading causes of divorce other than infidelity, but I’d wager that falling out of the workforce is worse than cheating on your spouse.
My wife deserves better than a misanthropic husband who is missing the genes for empathy and the capacity for ‘fun.’ I’ve never liked the word — it’s a non-word, a nothing, a container for whatever it is people do when they’re not doing anything. Considering that she’s an age group developmental swim coach with over thirty years behind the blocks, her interpretation of fun involves getting eight year olds to do no-breath 25 meter swims for a Ring Pop. The reward mechanism actually works. Her club has produced top ranked NCAA swimmers and a few US Olympic Trial qualifiers. She knows two Olympians not named Phelps or Ledecky (and, of course, their parents). To hell with that ‘for richer or poorer’ BS. I know a man who would be a better life partner for her than me.
Tony’s wife (not his real name) succumbed to cancer a decade ago. He didn’t remarry, raised three kids by himself and attends church. He sets up real estate deals for telcos putting up 5G towers, and his brother was formerly the Head of the Foreign Trading Desk at UBS. He has only one vodka drink at dinner (versus my not infrequent choice of a magnum for the two of us). His salt and pepper haired visage wouldn’t be out of place in the Robb Report, and he’s not romantically attached. They knew each other — his deceased spouse and my wife. They’re analogues. What’s not for Tony to like?
There are few emerging trends I find nettlesome. Why is every school kid and their Mom carrying around a Stanley Quencher that’s the size of an artillery shell? They call them “Stanley,” by name, for the anthropomorphic charm. They come in a rainbow of colors, and they’ve achieved nirvana in the water bottle category —accessorization. Different Quenchers are used for specific activities and complement different outfits. I appreciate staying hydrated, and the Stanley Corporation (parent company, PMI) deserves a hat tip for regaining relevance, but come on — they don’t fit in the top rack of the dishwasher and the custom straws get lost rendering the tankards useless.
Is your in-box full of invitations to drop ten thousand dollars on extension programs to learn artificial intelligence at MSU or MIT ProX or Indiana University? There is something to this. Employers want to adopt AI that will help them reduce the workforce, lean into robotics and internalize their marketing operations as endogenous data collection ramps up. The choice is going back to school or doing last mile deliveries as an Amazon driver … which is what the underachieving skills workers will be doing once the tech transformation roots out 20th Century obsolescence (myself included). The AI transformation will not be a bloodless revolution. People themselves are going to be a problem — what to do with them, how to occupy their minds and skills and ultimately how to keep them from revolting en masse. I’m not the only Cassandra.
The Presidential Election this second Tuesday in November will be a Plum Tuckered, Collins Jiggered, Wolf Blitzkrieged, Sean Banannity sideshow. Take the gloves off, No Labels, it’s time to nominate a Presidential candidate who doesn’t just pretend to be a mean clown. Write-in your vote for Krusty in 2024. His corruption is part of his charm — a prat fall sadist with a heart of gold. Other world leaders are dissemblers at best and conniving charlatans at worst. Politics attracts those imbued with ruthless ambition and preternatural opportunism in equal measure. Addressing 1.2 billion Chinese citizens and the rest of world this past New Year’s Eve, Xi Jinping channeled his inner weatherman.
“On the path ahead, winds and rains are the norm.”
You can’t blame the weather. Tying an under performing economy to a frontal system is a good tactic despite the Communist Party’s policies that have failed to perk up domestic growth, triggered a potential currency deflation and done nothing to curb high youth unemployment, but what’s an autocrat to do? Policy makers garner praise in good times (for things they may not have done) and suffer public opprobrium in bad times (for things they may have tried not to do) — economic statistics are lagging indicators. Similarly, the leader of the free world shared a New Year’s message.
“Have a healthy, happy and safe New Year” said the POTUS in an homage to reading the side effects on a pill bottle. “America is in a better position than any country in the world to lead the world.”
His message drifts off like the doddering engine of pelf that he is with barely a residue of meaning. Leaders (elected or not) are their nation’s chief storytellers — Xi understands this. Joe thinks aviators and Ivy League staffers do the trick, but Krusty, the embittered comedy legend, gets it — “I got news for you, this ‘ain’t makeup.” That’s leveling with the American people.
Will the New Year bring about a negotiated settlement in Ukraine? Will Israel’s counter offensive draw Lebanon, Syria and the US into the fight? War coverage is like cocaine — the dopamine jolt gets harder to achieve the more one is exposed to disaster. Numbness pervades. Flack jacketed war correspondents gum flap over Gaza images reminiscent of Dresden and the trenches in the Donetsk that could be from the Battle of the Somme add to emotional fatigue from personal tragedies — a forty-something co-worker’s heart attack, the random shooting of a college Junior at the student union, a fatal car accident ending the life of a college Sophomore and a husband/father’s suicide. Metrics accumulate: funerals attended, civilians killed, combatants killed, migrants crossing the border, candidates’ projected margins of victory within a nullifying margin of error and how the nine Justices will vote on cases before the Court.
Despite the doom scroll, we will celebrate athletes competing at the Summer Olympics in Paris. Leon Marchand will be feted as the greatest male swimmer in the world not named Phelps. The Summer Games will be the City of Light’s diversion from Trump trials, Biden’s impeachment, campaign machinations and war updates. Thanks be to sport — it’s the one thing that epitomizes meritocracy without much debate.
Anais Nin’s diary entry for New Year’s Day, January 1, 1940 is an ear whisper heavy with ennui. The US had not entered WWII yet.
“Great sadness last night as I heard the New Year celebration from my bed — I have lost a world of deep feeling and found one of mere noise and matter. Ever since I came I have lived as you do when you are visiting a fair. I only felt the gravity and harmony of Dorothy Norman, the holy and humble life of the Cooneys, and a moment of cosmic religious emotion before a film of the people of Ceylon, in which they are walking up the mountain to worship a reclining Buddah. Everything else is terrifyingly empty. I did feel, at Kay de San Faustino’s, talking to Yves Tanguay and Caresse Crosby (whom I met with Hugo, who forgot she is the woman I was supposed to have have known intimately in Paris and to have stayed with in the country), the poignant regret for the dying France. There was a real sorrow in all of us, Kay wishing she had died there, with them. More of us meet at the Gotham Book Shop and admitted how we all had run away from America and now we want to conquer it. But how is it possible to conquer this desert of inanities, this ocean of vulgarity, this abysmal immaturity?”
For someone whose relational exploits are the equivalent of an Only Fans account playing out on the Paris Review’s version of Page Six, she teed up a wistful premise about overcoming America’s baser instincts — that cultural enlightenment and the sensualization of human affairs (Art, in other words) could conquer philistinism, moral rectitude and the latent prejudice running through America’s veins. Eighty four years on, we can say that digital platforms and their users have conquered all that Anais pejoratively labeled. Those deserts, oceans and abysses have become elemental murmurations that bloom and shift with the menace of dark matter. Art and history in the form of a ubiquitous present have been subsumed in posts to our feeds — the interminable present.
Eeyore, Krusty and this New Years Day diary entry from 1940 share the animating principle of loss — whether it be a tail, a high flying (meta cartoon) television career, Europe as it was or America as it is. They are different notes of a common lamentation. Eyeore remarked “The sky has finally fallen. Always knew it would.” Let’s hope it happened in 2023.
